The Blasted Lands (31 page)

That was obviously still a sore spot. “If he’d killed those boys it would have been easier. I keep having to lock them back up for begging.”

“There are laws against begging?”

Libari nodded. “We only enforce them in certain areas. The areas where a beggar can actually make enough coins to offend someone.”

“Perhaps we can find something to do with that problem after everything else has been cleared up.”

Libari nodded his head again and moved into his office, his hands locked together behind his broad back. “So when does this evacuation take place properly?”

“Soon. And when it does I’ll need you and your guard handling a lot of the troubles.”

“Just so. And how long will we be expected to watch over the city after the evacuation?”

Merros nodded his head again. The man was not a dullard.

“Likely for at least a month. Assuming whatever this threat is doesn’t get resolved before then.”

“I expect a few men to quit their contracts.”

“I can bolster your ranks with soldiers.”

Libari smiled again, a tight and cold smile. “Are you quite certain they’ll stand for the demotion?”

There was a little flush of guilt at that. Merros was one of the many soldiers who tended to look down on the City Guard as secondary to real soldiers.

“They might not like it, but they’ll follow your orders.”

“Fair enough. If they fail to, I will treat them the same way I treat my men.”

“Which is?”

“Precisely the same way I’ve seen you discipline your own men.” He looked hard at Merros. “I don’t like using a lash either, but it has to be done to make certain the men understand the proper chain of command.”

“It’s your command, General Welliso. You’ll run it as you see fit.”

“That’s going to take some getting accustomed to.”

“The title?”

“Indeed.”

“You’ll manage. I’ve started adjusting already and it’s not even a year.”

***

Desh Krohan looked at the bodies and felt his skin shudder with disgust.

Necromancy. That was one form of sorcery he’d never wanted anything to do with. He’d studied it, to be sure, knew about the ways of the dark art and the advantages to be found from employing it, but that did not mean he had a fondness for the subject. It wasn't the soul or the fact that dead flesh was used, really, so much as it was simple messiness of the subject.

Bodies rot. Flesh falls apart. Bodies decay. And in the process there were a great number of sounds and odors he could deal without in his life.

When he was a young man one of the sorcerers who’d instructed him, Theurasa Sallis, had shown him how to revive dead flesh into a mimicry of living substance. It was a lesson he had never forgotten. The nightmares he suffered afterwards had lingered for a very long time indeed. The long remembered incident – and the need to put down what he had created – were among the reasons that necromancy was now a forbidden art in the Fellein Empire.

And yet he was looking at the results of what had to be necromancy, though it was not anything he was familiar with.

Merros Dulver stood next to him. There were a dozen others there as well, all of them looking on as Desh studied the creatures brought back from the trail to Old Canhoon by the soldiers that defeated them.

Besides the unclean things there was the body of an older member of the Sa’ba Taalor. Older than any Desh had seen, and withered. His mount was much the same, but beyond that it was almost impossible to say much about them. They’d both been trampled by the things that had followed them, and their remains were little more than broken, torn piles of bone.

Several different people had examined the remains which had then been sealed away. Why? Because no one knew exactly how to handle them. The idea had been to hand them over to Desh Krohan to study and he’d certainly meant to, but there had been no chance.

And now there was no choice. They had to understand what the things were, not merely what they had been.

Desh reached out and touched one of the shields that had been warped and crushed into a new shape along with the bodies of soldiers. The Imperial Crest was clear on the malformed metal.

“So what happened to them?” Welliso was the man’s name. He seemed a decent enough sort. Certainly Tega thought well enough of him and that was enough to garner him a bit of respect from Desh. His apprentice was had a perceptive mind. If not, she’d have never become his apprentice.

“Well, they died, obviously.” Desh looked at a corpse with a major’s rank still evidence on the breastplate of his armor. “This one. I saw him when the fighting started with Tuskandru.” His lip curled downward. “Wallford. Hradi’s dog.”

Merros started. He was not fond of the tone in Desh’s voice. Still he was wise enough to keep his tongue.

“This is necromancy. Sorcery as dark as any that exists. But it is not a form of necromancy I am familiar with.” Desh touched Wallford’s dead face – which had been stretched and crumpled along with his helmet. The end result was not pleasant to view – and several of the people in the room gasped as the corpse’s distended face twitched and the mouth opened and closed spasmodically.

“By all the gods….” He didn’t look up to find the voice.

“Durst,” Merros’ voice warned the man speaking.

Desh looked up to see one of the soldiers, Taurn Durst, with his sword half drawn. He looked at the man for a long second and the man looked back, deeply afraid.

“The sword will do you no good. They’re already dead. They’ve been dead. The only reason they stopped moving before is because whatever is controlling them told them to stop.”

Durst looked at him and shook his head. “The soldiers hacked them to bits.”

“The soldiers cut them, but they’ve been in here for a month or more and they’re still moving. If they were alive and locked in a cellar for thirty odd days they’d be dead and rotting. These are rotting and they are dead but they are also moving. And they aren’t rotting fast enough by half.”

Desh plucked a deeply wounded, severed hand from the table in front of him and showed it to the solider. The fingers clutched at the air.

Durst grew several shades paler and staggered back, his hand reaching for a token of one of the churches.

And in that moment Desh smiled.

“Thank you, Durst. You’re absolutely right.”

“I… What?” The man looked to Merros for help and the general looked to Desh and then back to him and shrugged. “What did I do?”

Desh put the hand on the table and walked over to the stocky man. With the same hand that had held the dead, squirming flesh he clapped the general’s aide on the shoulder.

“You’re absolutely right! We need priests!”

Merros looked at him as if he’d grown a tree out of his eyebrow. “We what?”

“The Sa’ba Taalor have a close relationship with their gods. We need people who can speak on behalf of our gods. Durst here is going to send out running and bring back a priest from each of our churches.” He looked to Durst. “Aren’t you?”

Durst looked to Desh and then to Merros, his eyes growing wider.

Merros sighed. “Go find priests, Durst. Make sure they’re ready to travel.”

“Where are they going, General?”

Merros shook his head and scowled at Desh. Desh offered his best smile in return. “I believe the First Advisor wants them to come with us to meet with the enemy.”

Desh straightened up and smiled. “There we have it. They’ll travel with us and we’ll ask them questions and get some answers. It’ll be a wonderful and enlightening experience, to be sure.”

He turned to leave the room. “Oh. And burn these things. Burn them down to ash. When you’re done, take the ashes to the river and scatter them in the water past the city. Whatever metal is left should be brought back down here for me to study.”

Merros looked to his men and nodded.

A moment later he walked into the narrow corridor leading from the long disused holding cells where one of the previous Emperors had kept his favorite playthings and caught up with Desh.

“What are you thinking?”

“You said it yourself, Merros. We need to understand the Sa’ba Taalor better. We also need to understand the part their gods play in all of this.”

“So how will priests from around here help with that.”

“They won’t. But maybe having priests along with us will make them think our gods are ready to fight against their gods.”

Merros nodded his head. He could see the logic well enough.

“They’re not going to be happy about going along, I’d wager.”

“That would be a problem the priests can take up with their gods.”

Chapter Fourteen

How does one recover from being physically changed? Andover looked at his face, at the strange slash across his cheek, and then flexed his jaw. His mouths opened. Both of them. Rather than panicking he considered the matter clinically. How does one recover? One does not. One adapts.

He looked down at his hands and at the scars where his old hands had once been attached to his body.

One adapts.

He sighed and heard the sound come mostly from his throat, but also from the smaller mouth, the “Great Scar” that moved and existed where before there had only been skin.

Andover did not understand all of the workings of the human body and he was exactly wise enough to know that he faced a mystery along those lines. His second mouth was a good deal smaller, and it could be hidden, he supposed, if he simply did not open his mouth. Mouths. That was going to take getting used to.

The polished metal he used to look at his face was not perfect, but there was only a small amount of distortion. He knew that when he looked at the open scar and saw gums and teeth, they were real and fairly close to what he was looking at. He could even accept the change because he could see it. The parts he had trouble with were deeper than that. Below the surface as it were. He could feel the tongue in his new mouth. He could hear it speak from time to time.

More interestingly, he could understand the words it said, though before the changes Durhallem had made to him he would not have heard anything but gibberish.

“Are you going to stay in there all day? Or will you come out and look at the farms as we discussed?” Delil’s voice was without guile.

He thought about the feel of her body against his, the way her hands felt when they ran across his body, the touch of her lips on his neck, and his heartbeat increased.

“I’m coming.” He set down the silver disk Tusk had found for him and stretched, feeling the play of muscles under his skin. The air was cool and clear and he felt surprisingly good. Part of him wondered how that was possible with the changes he was going through but he suspected it was because of those changes, really. He had hands. The Sa’ba Taalor who had looked seen him as a stranger were now seeing him as an equal and that was an amazing thing.

The Great Scar left on him by Durhallem was a sign that he was an adult in the eyes of the valley people. He didn’t understand all of their reasons, but he appreciated them.

The bag he grabbed held his belongings. It was time to leave Durhallem and move across the valley. There were other kings he had to meet. There were other gods he had to meet.

Gods.

His ears rang at the notion.

Delil stood in the daylight, her supplies already strapped across her back. She was alone. She tilted her head as she looked at him, squinting against the early morning glare. “You move like a glacier.”

“A what?”

She shook her head. “A glacier. A frozen river. Never mind. You have to see one to understand.”

“Are there glaciers in the valley?”

“No. There are three to the north of the Hearts of the Gods. Perhaps you will see them someday.” She waved the notion away. “Come now. We have far to go.”

He slung his pack over his shoulders and shrugged the weight into the now familiar place it had held during his walk to the Seven Forges. “No one else is coming with us?” His obsidian he held in a bundle of leather that he carried wrapped around one wrist. His hammer was slung over his other shoulder and easily shrugged free if he should need it.

Delil looked over her shoulder and shook her head. “I will have to be enough for you.” Her voice held a teasing edge and despite how much he had changed, he still blushed at her comment.

Andover was not aware on a conscious level of how much weight he carried with ease, but had he tried carrying as much only a year before he would have fallen on his back like an upended turtle. He did not consider that the clothes he’d brought with him were for a smaller man, or how snugly they would have fit him now because he wore the clothes of the locals instead. A vest and breeches and boots. More than that would have to be unbundled from his supplies.

Delil walked, heading quickly to the pens where Andover could see Tusk dealing with the massive mount he rode, Brodem. Even the animal eyed him differently as he approached.

“It is time for you to leave.” The words were stated like a question, but the tone was conversational. Tusk knew the answer even before he spoke.

Andover nodded his head. “Thank you. For all that you have done on my behalf.”

“I have fed you and not killed you. Return the courtesy some day and we are even.”

Andover grinned at that and the man smiled back, his broad face with its odd mouth-scars already becoming something Andover could easily accept. How quickly the mind adapts. “I think you are safe on both accounts, Tusk.”

The king slapped his arm again and Andover braced himself for it, kept his balance.

“Show me the obsidian, yes?” Tusk pointed to the rolled leather. It seemed the man knew exactly where the two pieces were kept.

Andover crouched and unrolled the packing. The king squatted next to him and nodded. “What do you see Andover Iron Hands?”

The heavy axe blade was clear enough to understand. The other piece, the gift that Durhallem had offered up, was a curved, twisted line of obsidian that looked like nothing so much as a simple club. “I think you’re right about the axe, of course.”